A LAODICEAN
THOMAS HARDY was born in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, on 2 June 1840. He was educated locally and at sixteen was articled to a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London and found employment with another architect, Arthur Blomfield. He now began to write poetry and published an essay. By 1867 he had returned to Dorset to work as Hicks’s assistant and began his first (unpublished) novel, The Poor Man and the Lady.
On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts.
After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy’s finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset.
JOHN SCHAD was educated at the University of York and the University of Wales, Swansea, where he also held a Research Fellowship. He is now Lecturer in English at Loughborough University and is the author of The Reader in the Dickensian Mirrors: Some New Language (Macmillan, 1992) and editor of Dickens Refigured: Bodies, Desires and Other Histories (Manchester University Press, 1996). He is currently completing Victorians in Theory: The Insistence of Spirit, also for Manchester University Press.
PATRICIA INGHAM is General Editor of all Hardy’s fiction in the Penguin Classics Edition. She is a Fellow of St Anne’s College, Reader in English and The Times Lecturer in English Language, Oxford University. She has written extensively on the Victorian novel and on Hardy in particular. Her most recent publications include Dickens, Women and Language (1992) and The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the Victorian Novel (1996). She has also edited Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South and Thomas Hardy’s The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved and The Well-Beloved for Penguin Classics.
OR
THE CASTLE OF THE DE STANCYS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published in 1881
Published in Penguin Classics 1997
11
Notes and Introduction copyright © John Schad, 1997
General Editor’s Preface and Chronology copyright © Patricia Ingham, 1996
All rights reserved
Figure 12 is reproduced by permission of the
Syndics of Cambridge University Library. All other illustrations,
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The moral right of the editors has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN:978-0-14-192204-1
General Editor’s Preface
Chronology: Hardy’s Life and Works
Map: The Wessex of the Novels
List of Illustrations
Bibliographical Note
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the History of the Text
A LAODICEAN
Book the First: George Somerset
Book the Second: Dare and Havill
Book the Third: De Stancy
Book the Fourth: Somerset, Dare and De Stancy
Book the Fifth: De Stancy and Paula
Book the Sixth: Paula
1896 Preface and 1912 Postscript
Notes
Appendix: A Note on the Illustrations
Glossary
This edition uses, with one exception, the first edition in volume form of each of Hardy’s novels and therefore offers something not generally available. Their dates range from 1871 to 1897. The purpose behind this choice is to present each novel as the creation of its own period and without revisions of later times, since these versions have an integrity and value of their own. The outline of textual history that follows is designed to expand on this statement.
All of Hardy’s fourteen novels, except Jude the Obscure (1895) which first appeared as a volume in the Wessex Novels, were published individually as he wrote them (from 1871 onwards). Apart from Desperate Remedies (1871), and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), all were published first as serials in periodicals, where they were subjected to varying degrees of editorial interference and censorship. Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree appeared directly in volume form from Tinsley Brothers. By 1895 ten more novels had been published in volumes by six different publishers.
By 1895 Hardy was sufficiently well-established to negotiate with Osgood, McIlvaine a collected edition of all earlier novels and short story collections plus the volume edition of Jude the Obscure. The Well-Beloved (radically changed from its serialized version) was added in 1897, completing the appearance of all Hardy’s novels in volume form. Significantly this collection was called the ‘Wessex Novels’ and contained a map of ‘The Wessex of the Novels’ and authorial prefaces, as well as frontispieces by Macbeth-Raeburn of a scene from the novel sketched ‘on the spot’. The texts were heavily revised by Hardy, amongst other things, in relation to topography, to strengthen the ‘Wessex’ element so as to suggest that this half-real half-imagined location had been coherently conceived from the beginning, though of course he knew that this was not so. In practice ‘Wessex’ had an uncertain and ambiguous development in the earlier editions. To trace the growth of Wessex in the novels as they appeared it is necessary to read them in their original pre-1895 form. For the 1895–6 edition represents a substantial layer of reworking.
Similarly, in the last fully revised and collected edition of 1912–13, the Wessex Edition, further alterations were made to topographical detail and photographs of Dorset were included. In the more open climate of opinion then prevailing, sexual and religious references were sometimes (though not always) made bolder. In both collected editions there were also many changes of other kinds. In addition, novels and short story volumes were grouped thematically as ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, ‘Romances and Fantasies’ and ‘Novels of Ingenuity’ in a way suggesting a unifying master plan underlying all texts. A few revisions were made for the Mellstock edition of 1919–20, but to only some texts.
It is various versions of the 1912–13 edition which are generally available today, incorporating these layers of alteration and shaped in part by the critical climate when the alterations were made. Therefore the present edition offers the texts as Hardy’s readers first encountered them, in a form of which he in general approved, the version that his early critics reacted to. It reveals Hardy as he first dawned upon the public and shows how his writing (including the creation of Wessex) developed, partly in response to differing climates of opinion in the 1870s, 1880s and early 1890s. In keeping with these general aims, the edition will reproduce all contemporary illustrations where the originals were line drawings. In addition, for all texts which were illustrated, individual volumes will provide an appendix discussing the artist and the illustrations.
The exception to the use of the first volume editions is Far from the Madding Crowd, for which Hardy’s holograph manuscript will be used. That edition will demonstrate in detail just how the text is ‘the creation of its own period’: by relating the manuscript to the serial version and to the first volume edition. The heavy editorial censoring by Leslie Stephen for the serial and the subsequent revision for the volume provide an extreme example of the processes that in many cases precede and produce the first book versions. In addition, the complete serial version (1892) of The Well-Beloved will be printed alongside the volume edition, since it is arguably a different novel from the latter.
To complete the picture of how the texts developed later, editors trace in their Notes on the History of the Text the major changes in 1895–6 and 1912–13. They quote significant alterations in their explanatory notes and include the authorial prefaces of 1895–6 and 1912–13. They also indicate something of the pre-history of the texts in manuscripts where these are available. The editing of the short stories will be separately dealt with in the two volumes containing them.
Patricia Ingham
St Anne’s College, Oxford
1840 |
2 June: Thomas Hardy born, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, eldest child of a builder, Thomas Hardy, and Jemima Hand, who had been married for less than six months. Younger siblings: Mary, Henry, Katherine (Kate), to whom he remained close. |
1848–56 |
Schooling in Dorset. |
1856 |
Hardy watched the hanging of Martha Browne for the murder of her husband. (Thought to be remembered in the death of Tess Durbeyfield.) |
1856–60 |
Articled to Dorchester architect, John Hicks; later his assistant. |
late 1850s |
Important friendship with Horace Moule (eight years older, middle-class and well-educated), who became his intellectual mentor and encouraged his self-education. |
1862 |
London architect, Arthur Blomfield, employed him as a draughtsman. Self-education continued. |
1867 |
Returned to Dorset as a jobbing architect. He worked for Hicks on church restoration. |
1868 |
Completed his first novel The Poor Man and the Lady but it was rejected for publication (see 1878). |
1869 |
Worked for the architect Crickmay in Weymouth, again on church restoration. |
1870 |
After many youthful infatuations thought to be referred to in early poems, met his first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, on a professional visit to St Juliot in north Cornwall. |
1871 |
Desperate Remedies published in volume form by Tinsley Brothers. |
1872 |
Under the Greenwood Tree published in volume form by Tinsley Brothers. |
1873 |
A Pair of Blue Eyes (previously serialized in Tinsleys’ Magazine). Horace Moule committed suicide. |
1874 |
Far from the Madding Crowd (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine). Hardy married Emma and set up house in London (Surbiton). They had no children, to Hardy’s regret; and she never got on with his family. |
1875 |
The Hardys returned to Dorset (Swanage). |
1876 |
The Hand of Ethelberta (previously serialized in the Cornhill Magazine). |
1878 |
The Return of the Native (previously serialized in Belgravia). The Hardys moved back to London (Tooting). Serialized version of part of first unpublished novel appeared in Harper’s Weekly in New York as An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress. It was never included in his collected works. |
1880 |
The Trumpet-Major (previously serialized in Good Words). Hardy ill for many months. |
1881 |
A Laodicean (previously serialized in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine). The Hardys returned to Dorset. |
1882 |
Two on a Tower (previously serialized in the Atlantic Monthly). |
1885 |
The Hardys moved for the last time to a house, Max Gate, outside Dorchester, designed by Hardy and built by his brother. |
1886 |
The Mayor of Casterbridge (previously serialized in the Graphic). |
1887 |
The Woodlanders (previously serialized in Macmillan’s Magazine). |
1888 |
Wessex Tales. |
1891 |
A Group of Noble Dames (tales). Tess of the D’Urbervilles (previously serialized in censored form in the Graphic). It simultaneously enhanced his reputation as a novelist and caused a scandal because of its advanced views on sexual conduct. |
1892 |
Hardy’s father, Thomas, died. Serialized version of The Well-Beloved, entitled The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved in the Illustrated London News. Growing estrangement from Emma. |
1892–3 |
Our Exploits at West Poky, a long tale for boys, published in an American periodical, the Household. |
1893 |
Met Florence Henniker, one of several society women with whom he had intense friendships. Collaborated with her on The Spectre of the Real (published 1894). |
1894 |
Life’s Little Ironies (tales). |
1895 |
Jude the Obscure, a savage attack on marriage which worsened relations with Emma. Serialized previously in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. It received both eulogistic and vitriolic reviews. The latter were a factor in his ceasing to write novels. |
1895–6 |
First Collected Edition of novels: Wessex Novels (16 volumes), published by Osgood, McIlvaine. This included the first book edition of Jude the Obscure. |
1897 |
The Well-Beloved (rewritten) published as a book; added to the Wessex Novels as vol. XVII. From now on he published only the poetry he had been writing since the 1860s. No more novels. |
1898 |
Wessex Poems and Other Verses. Hardy and Emma continued to live at Max Gate but were now estranged and ‘kept separate’. |
1901 |
Poems of the Past and the Present. |
1902 |
Macmillan became his publishers. |
1904 |
Part 1 of The Dynasts (epic-drama in verse on Napoleon). Hardy’s mother, Jemima, ‘the single most important influence in his life’, died. |
1905 |
Met Florence Emily Dugdale, his future second wife, then aged 26. Soon a friend and secretary. |
1906 |
Part 2 of The Dynasts. |
1908 |
Part 3 of The Dynasts. |
1909 |
Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses. |
1910 |
Awarded Order of Merit, having previously refused a knighthood. |
1912–13 |
Major collected edition of novels and verse, revised by Hardy: The Wessex Edition (24 volumes). 27 November: Emma died still estranged. This triggered the writing of Hardy’s finest love-lyrics about their early time in Cornwall. |
1913 |
A Changed Man and Other Tales. |
1914 |
10 February: married Florence Dugdale (already hurt by his poetic reaction to Emma’s death). Satires of Circumstance. The Dynasts: Prologue and Epilogue. |
1915 |
Mary, Hardy’s sister, died. His nephew, Frank, killed at Gallipoli. |
1916 |
Selected Poems. |
1917 |
Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. |
1919–20 |
Mellstock Edition of novels and verse (37 volumes). |
1922 |
Late Lyrics and Earlier with Many Other Verses. |
1923 |
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (drama). |
1924 |
Dramatized Tess performed at Dorchester. Hardy infatuated with the local woman, Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess. |
1925 |
Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles. |
1928 |
Hardy died on 11 January. His heart was buried in Emma’s grave at Stinsford, his ashes in Westminster Abbey. Winter Words published posthumously. Hardy’s brother, Henry, died. |
1928–30 |
Hardy’s autobiography published (on his instructions) under his second wife’s name. |
1937 |
Florence Hardy (his second wife) died. |
1940 |
Hardy’s last sibling, Kate, died. |
This map is from the Wessex Novels Edition, 1895–6
PLATE I “But, my dear lady, you promised.” (page 13)
PLATE II “Fine old screen, sir!” (page 59)
PLATE III “What an escape!” he said. (page 84)
PLATE IV The garden party. (page 103)
PLATE V “There is no Mrs. De Stancy?” he said in an undertone. (page 136)
PLATE VI “Is the resemblance strong?” (page 168)
PLATE VII The young man was at her side before she had crossed the pavement. (page 192)
PLATE VIII “My uncle, Mr. Abner Power.” (page 219)
PLATE IX “And you will please to deliver them into no hands but his own.” (page 257)
PLATE X It was a portrait of Somerset. (page 282)
PLATE XI De Stancy screened Paula with his umbrella. (page 307)
PLATE XII Soon a funeral procession of simple – almost meagre and threadbare – character arrived. (page 323)
PLATE XIII At Étretât: Somerset now made them known to one another. (page 363)
The following abbreviations will be used for frequently cited works:
Architectural Notebook: C. J. P. Beatty (ed.), The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy (Dorchester: Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 1966)
Collected Letters: R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate (eds.), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978–88)
Life: Thomas Hardy, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy, ed. Michael Millgate (London: Macmillan, 1984)
Literary Notebooks: L. Björk (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1985)
Personal Notebooks: R. Taylor (ed.), The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1978)
Philosophy… represents… itself
as… an art of architecture.
(Jacques Derrida)1
More than any other of Hardy’s novels A Laodicean draws upon the author’s own professional experience of architecture; it is also, claims Martin Seymour-Smith, ‘Hardy’s most sheerly intellectual novel’ – a curious combination, as one contemporary reviewer observed, of ‘melodrama and philosophy’.2 Indeed, anticipating Derrida, A Laodicean is concerned with uncovering an ancient analogy between architecture and philosophy; it is no accident that the architect Somerset is the grandson of ‘a notable metaphysician’ (I, xii).3 The novel gives renewed significance, if you like, to the familiar notion of the ‘philosopher’s stone’ (I, v).
For Hardy and his first readers the connection between architecture and philosophy would have been very pertinent in the sense that the period’s ‘stylistic eclecticism was,’ as J. B. Bullen writes, ‘frequently related to philosophical relativism’.4 Fittingly, Paula Power (the heroine) is not only criticized for her eclectic approach to the restoration of Stancy Castle5 but also suspected of relativist religious views. In fact Paula, the waverer or Laodicean of the novel’s title, so lacks a fixed ground or centre as to be very conspicuously at odds with the foundationalism of both architecture and philosophy. To develop the point: the figure of Paula, reflecting ‘the bottomless depths [of]… her eyes’ (I, xi), hints at a groundlessness of thought that undermines philosophy’s habitual perception of itself as a firm and grounded structure.6 This groundlessness is not, though, just an absence of ground but also, in part, a release from it. Paula is capable, we learn, of ‘flights of thought’ (IV, ii); and for her, looking out on the city of Strasburg, it is not the firm and grounded houses but the storks flying above them that are ‘philosophical’ (V, i). Freedom from ground is something that Paula very obviously represents both in her high-flying gymnastics (II, vii) and in the dance she hosts in which ‘human beings shak[e]… themselves free of all inconvenient gravitation’ (I, xv). Given too her capacity for the playful reworking of philosophy7 she seems, like Hardy’s contemporary, the radical philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to have ‘kill[ed] the Spirit of Gravity’8 in more senses than one.
To suggest the same of the author of A Laodicean is to refer both to the novel’s comedy and to the curious fact that during its composition Hardy suffered from an illness which, for several months, ‘compelled [him] to lie,’ as he himself expressed it, ‘with the lower part of his body higher than his head’.9 With Hardy himself so literally groundless there is a bizarre biographical logic to the novel’s riddling references to ‘an enchanted submarine palace’ (I, xv) and ‘unpedestaled Dionysus’ (II, iii). At one point we do read that ‘a man [at the castle] searched for old foundations’ (III, x) but, strangely, nothing more is said; it is merely an aside and thus a mild, silent dismissal of the architectural-cum-philosophical preoccupation with foundations.
In A Laodicean what Annie Escuret describes as Hardy’s ‘refus [al of the]… world… of the architect’ intersects with what Michael Millgate describes as his ‘lack [or suspicion] of… systematic philosophy’.10 The result is a novel which both identifies and questions the often invisible assumption that the house is the space of philosophy – the only way, if you like, to imagine thought in spatial terms. (It is an assumption towards which the novel twice glances in the opening scenes: first with the phrase ‘it was brought home to his intelligence’ [I, i] and then with the description of the castle walls as ‘of a thickness sufficient for the perpetuation of grand ideas’ [I, ii].) That Hardy has an intuitive suspicion of the architectural pretensions of philosophy is perhaps most obvious in a letter of 1892 where he condemns ‘metaphysic’ (caught, as he sees it, between ‘Deism and Materialism’) as ‘a halfway house’.11 The halfway house (the house that is not quite a house) appears, though, to be already on Hardy’s mind when composing A Laodicean. Not only is the castle as much a military as domestic space but Woodwell’s dreary cottage is ‘without any natural union with [the earth]’ (III, xi) whilst at Sir William De Stancy’s ‘sun and air riddl[e]… the house everywhere’ (I, v). The whole novel, in fact, serves to riddle, or complicate our notion of a house; for with its curious references to lighthouses (V, x), trading houses (V, xi), a ‘house of cards’ (I, viii), and ‘the house of… Jacob’ (V, xi), A Laodicean seems, at times, to be an answer to the riddle ‘when is a house not a house?’
This is particularly the case with respect to Charlotte De Stancy to whose family the castle no longer belongs but who, as Paula’s companion, virtually lives there – as Somerset observes ‘This is [both] home to you, and not home’ (I, iv). So interpreted, Charlotte’s relationship to the castle very precisely anticipates Freud’s account of the uncanny (or Unheimlich) as that which is at once both homely and unhomely.12 And of course if, as Freud argues, ‘“Unheimlich” is the name for everything that ought to have remained… hidden but has come to light’13 then the castle is uncanny in the sense that it houses (and thereby both hides and discloses) the quasi-lesbian relationship between Paula and Charlotte. ‘“They are more like lovers than girl and girl”‘ (I, v), remarks one local.
The castle is again marked by the unhomely revelation of a sexual relationship in a very strange scene in which Somerset sits down to sketch his plan for the restoration; as he does so Paula, who is elsewhere described as ‘sinister’14 bends over him and, with ‘the breath of her words fann[ing] his ear,’ murmurs, ‘“Ah, I begin to see your conception”‘ (I, ix). For an uncanny moment we are tempted to misread her words as a reference to the conception of Somerset. The architect’s conception becomes, that is, not a mental or intellectual event but a sexual one. Architectural creation is here in danger of losing all the metaphysical significance with which it has been traditionally invested. For instance, to explain Plato one seventeenth-century commentator wrote that ‘from the beginning the Architect conceives in his spirit… the Idea of the edifice; he then makes the house… in the way in which he has decided in his mind’.15 As this illustrates, the house has long been the exemplar of the metaphysical understanding of the world as merely a material presentation of prior and immaterial ideas. Much then is put at risk by the sheer ambiguity of Paula’s ‘I see your conception’. The pure and prior intelligence that architecture has traditionally represented is opened up to the possibility of an outrageously impure and posterior intelligence.
Architecture is similarly opened up in the casino at Monte Carlo which, like the castle, is a house that is also not a house (casino is the diminutive of casa, meaning ‘house’). Indeed, it comes close to being the ‘unheimlich house’, or unhomely home which Freud himself translates as the ‘haunted house’.16 Described as a ‘phantasmagoria’ the casino is, from the outset, marked by a suggestion of phantasms, or phantoms; a suggestion which only grows as we read of ‘half-charmed spellbound’ gamblers ‘familiar with many forms of utterance’ and arranged in a ‘hollow circle’ of ‘murky intelligences around a table’ (IV, iv). The image thus parodically conjured up is of a seance – that central motif of the spiritualist boom in the late nineteenth century. But if the diminutive house of gambling is haunted then so too is the big house of architecture, of which the casino is also a kind of parody. Not only are its tables covered in ‘figures… lines [and]… diagram[s]’ (IV, iv) but here Somerset re-encounters none other than William Dare, his former and disgraced architectural assistant, who declares that the probability of his finally winning is grounded – architecturally, as it were – on a ‘vast foundation of waste chances’. Thus parodied by a casino which is at the same time a parody of a seance, architecture seems a long way from its traditional analogy to philosophy. To put it another way, it is not Somerset’s relationship to a ‘notable metaphysician’ that here strikes us but his relationship to a notable charlatan, the disreputable Dare whom Somerset, it seems, can never quite escape. Architecture (traditionally the analogue of all that is grounded and rational) is here doubled by all that is groundless, irrational and specious.
What, though, is so intriguing about this is that it does not come to us as a total surprise. Paula, for instance, has already pointed up architecture’s capacity to depart from conventional ways of knowing; it is, she remarks, ‘an art which makes one… independent of written history’ (I, viii). Indeed, as the Victorian fashion for eclecticism made clear, architecture may also make one independent of linear history. Witness the Saxon abbey with Gothic arches17 ‘built ere the art was known’ (I, iv); in this instance architecture is not so much science as a kind of prescience. It is, admittedly, an unusual moment, but nevertheless one that reflects the novel’s more general attempt to disentangle architecture from metaphysics, the philosophy of knowing. For example, whilst metaphysics is preoccupied with abstraction, certainty and, above all, presence, Paula’s encounter with the stonework in the castle chapel is characterized by touch, doubt and, above all, absence. She is concerned with ‘deep hollows’ in the ornamentation which, to appreciate, she must touch rather than view:
She pulled off her glove… her hand resting in the stone channel… [and] the ideas [were] derived through her hand [before] pass[ing] into her face.
‘No, I’m not sure now,’ she said. (I, xi)
Absence and doubt again beset the classically architectural relationship between stone and idea, castle and character, when Somerset reads a newspaper announcement of Paula’s engagement:
In his meditation he stood still, closely scanning one of the jamb-stones of a doorless entrance, as if to discover where the old hinge-hook had entered the stonework. (III, xi)
What occupies Somerset is, of course, the announcement and not a hinge-hook that is no longer in a doorway that no longer has a door. Here then, the relationship between mind and stone constitutes what is almost an edifice of negations; an edifice that is completed just a few lines later as Paula declares that the announcement itself has ‘no foundation whatever’.
In A Laodicean the architectural relationship comes close, it seems, to an articulation not just of specific absences (hollowed stones and doorless doorways) but of absence itself. Indeed, the definition of a building as the creation of not just a space but an absence is very nearly realized when, later in the novel, the church at Caen is described as ‘absolutely empty, the void being emphasized by its great coolness’ (VI, ii). In this novel even the house of God is at odds with philosophy’s traditional intuition of the house as a metaphor for presence. It is an intuition that Martin Heidegger has articulated in terms of ‘the house of Being’18 and which Hardy himself seems to glance at in the sentence that begins ‘Being a dwelling’ (I, v).
A Laodicean does not, however, simply exchange absence for presence; for what most troubles presence is representation – that unruly realm of the copy, or image which lies (Laodicean-like) between presence and absence. The church in Caen, for instance, turns out not to be absolutely empty but occupied by a visiting painter; likewise, when Somerset takes Paula’s hand to assist her exploration of the chapel’s deep hollows it is almost as if her fingers were an artist’s pencil: ‘he seized her forefinger between his own finger and thumb, and drew it along the hollow’ (I, xi: my italics). In both cases, even as the house of architecture seems emptied of presence so the maker of representations emerges. Though Somerset’s grandfather is a metaphysician his father, we note, is a painter; moreover the castle, the very focus of the novel’s architectural activity and debate, accommodates not only a temporary theatre but a whole gallery of portraits. In short, the novel complicates that ‘general [and simple] opposition between an inner world of presence and outer world of representation’, which the house, ‘as the traditional figure of interior[ity] is used to establish’.19 In A Laodicean the ‘outer’ world of representation (the world of theatre and portraits) is always already housed within the inner world of that house of houses, the castle. Indeed, the novel reminds us that a house is not just a dwelling but a semblance, a copy of other buildings and other styles – something that Victorian architecture, with its fascination for past forms, knew well. This point is made in the very first scene, where Somerset is copying a church which, with its ‘battlemented parapet’ (I, i), is already a copy, the copy of a castle. It is no accident that the architect should acknowledge that photography, the ultimate art of reproduction, is ‘a shadow of his own pursuits’ (I, vi).
There is, however, another sense in which photography is the shadow of architecture and, in particular, the house; for, as the novel reminds us, photography derives from the camera obscura, which literally means ‘darkened room’. This optical instrument was so-called because it reproduced in a small, closed box the effect of light entering a minute hole in the wall of a darkened room and creating an inverted image of what is outside. The novel’s first approximation to such a room is a castle turret which has only a ‘slit’ for the admission of ‘a streak of fire as narrow as a corn-stalk’ (I, ix); the second is the railway tunnel ‘in the darkness of [which Somerset]… could see th[e]… other end as a mere speck of light’ (I, xii); the third is the ‘octagonal chamber… [with shutters closed and into which] only stray beams of light gleam’ (V, ii); and the fourth is a bizarre ‘painting room’ the ‘overpowering gloom’ of which is only offset – in a curious mimicry of the photographer’s ‘arrangement of curtains and lenses’ (I, viii) – by a ‘complicated apparatus of lamps, candles and reflectors’ (III, v). In so tracing the photographer’s debt to the room (and thus to the house) the novel astutely places even this daring new medium under the ancient, domestic sign of philosophy.
The darkened room of photography is, of course, related to philosophy via Plato’s cave, or rather his simile of the cave. I refer to that seminal simile of Western metaphysics in which man is compared to a prisoner in a cave and able to see nothing except the shadows projected by a fire on to the opposite wall; the visible world, argues Plato, is merely a projection of another, greater realm of essences and abstract forms.20 Photography and Platonism (albeit very much vulgarized) were, in fact, connected for the Victorians who, as Tom Gunning has argued, to some extent made imaginative sense of this new science by supposing all objects to have a phantasmatic double, or essence which exists in the atmosphere and is captured by the camera.21 What confirms, though, photography’s implication in philosophy is that, as Eduardo Cadava points out, ‘both take their life from light’.22 Photography depends, as its name suggests (photos meaning ‘light’), on the chemical action of light on sensitive film whilst philosophy has often taken the sun as a metaphor for a founding, or central principle. Sometimes this is explicit, as in Plato’s use of the sun as the image of ‘the absolute form of Good’,23 and sometimes implicit as in the eighteenth-century equation of reason with enlightenment. In A Laodicean, however, Dare’s trick photograph of Somerset (making him appear to be drunk) prompts the almost unthinkable thought that ‘God’s sun should bear false witness’ (V, xiii). With this thought the novel throws into question not only the sun but the absolute Good or even God that, within philosophy, the sun has traditionally represented.
Victorian culture had, for some time, been marked by anxiety about the sun, from both scientific as well as poetic perspectives. The well-publicized fears of solar physicists that the sun was cooling were echoed in John Ruskin’s declaration that ‘I want to believe in Apollo [the god of the sun] – but can’t.’24 That A Laodicean touches upon the same anxiety is clear; the sunset with which the novel begins thereafter constantly repeats upon us, echoed as it is in ‘Somerset’ – the name of not only the chief male character but also the county in which the novel is, originally, set. So far, so Ruskin (as it were) since for Ruskin the Romantic myth of the sun-god, particularly as celebrated in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, was best reinterpreted in terms of the myth of the sunset;25 this myth of death and decline was, he felt, more appropriate to his own, less confident generation. What, though, distinguishes A Laodicean is that its doubts about the sun finally focus not on a sunset but a trick photograph. For Hardy the death of the sun is not redeemed by the sublime pathos of its setting; instead, it is implicated in the bathos of a trickery that was particularly popular among charlatan spiritualists keen to produce what were called ‘spirit photographs’.26 As then, A Laodicean throws the sun into question so we are introduced to a world in which the bizarre and improbable seem to take place: not only might ghosts seem to appear but, as Mr Ray remarks, ‘the German Emperor [to be] in a violent passion… the Prime Minister [to be] out of his mind… [and] the Pope… the worse for liquor’ (V, xiii). Dare’s photography represents not just the shadowy double of architecture but also the possibility of a shadowy inversion of the world itself. After all, as well as being ‘a maker of negatives’ (in which, of course, lights and shades are reversed) Dare is himself described as ‘“a complete negative”‘ (I, viii); he seems, that is, to occupy a space between all positive terms or categories. He is neither masculine nor feminine (‘his hair hung as a fringe… in the fashion [of]… the other sex’ [I, vi]), old or young (‘I can’t think whether he is a boy or a man’ [I, viii]), English or foreign (‘he is a being of no nationality’), aristocrat or commoner (he is only an illegitimate De Stancy). In short, Dare ‘the complete negative’ alerts us to what Roland Barthes calls ‘the profound madness of photography’,27 the madness of an art which through inversion offers the world an absolutely exact but monochrome double of itself – a kind of ghost, in fact.
So described photography betrays something of its kinship to writing – that other ‘black and white’ (IV, i) art of duplication after which, of course, photography is named (graphos meaning ‘writing’). This line of descent is not forgotten in A Laodicean. In the first instance, a photograph of Dare is described as a ‘transcript of… [his] features’ (II, iv) and enclosed in an ‘envelope’ for Captain De Stancy to deliver, like a letter, to the police (though this he fails to do); in the second instance, Mr Ray refers to Dare’s trick photography as ‘libellous’ (V, xiii) (libel meaning ‘book’). In both cases it is the sheer unreliability of writing that photography serves to foreground, its capacity (as Derrida would say) ‘not to arrive’28 – not to arrive, that is, at either its addressee or, indeed, the truth. Dare’s photography represents a shadow of not only architecture but writing, not only Somerset’s pursuits but Hardy’s.
The whole novel, however, is almost a shadow or negative of what both contemporary and modern-day readers would recognize as a ‘Hardy’ novel. This is no Wessex tragedy of character and environment; remember Hardy had already written both Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and The Return of the Native (1878). Instead, it is an almost placeless novel of social comedy and improbable action which most Hardy critics have, until recently, considered dull if not disastrous.29 Moreover, the unique circumstances of the novel’s very composition – Hardy dictated most of it to his first wife, Emma, from his sickbed – do themselves make strange, or unfamiliar the business of writing. Just as Somerset, when bedridden, is thereby rendered ‘unarchitectural’ (VI, iii) so Hardy’s illness effectively rendered him ‘unauthorial’; involving another in the act of composition necessarily disrupts the conventional nineteenth-century dream of the author-God as the single, undivided origin of the literary work.
The disruption of this metaphysical dream of authorship is not, however, most obviously reflected by photography (‘light-writing’) but rather telegraphy (‘far-writing’). For whilst photography places writing beside the sign of light and, therefore, of metaphysics, telegraphy places it beside the sign of distance (tele meaning ‘far off’). That photography represents the less radical model, or picture of writing is underlined by its implication in patriarchy, the rule of the father. As the ‘heliographic science’ (V, iv) it is a masculine preserve both in name (the sun, helios, is traditionally male) and by implication – ‘No woman,’ we read, ‘could have doubted… [Dare’s trick] photograph’ (my italics). By contrast the telegraphic machine in the castle is dominated by Charlotte and Paula. Indeed, the only male who shares ‘the trick of [the telegram] is… a page… called John’ (III, x) which is all we ever know about him. The trick, or joke of this ‘page called John’ is that the relatively new medium of telegraphy is marked by the name of the author of not only the biblical book of Revelation (from which, of course, the novel derives its very name) but also the famous biblical declaration ‘In the beginning was the Word’. A Laodicean thus anticipates, in typically cryptic fashion, both the humour and seriousness of Derrida’s claim that ‘In the beginning was the telephone’30 (for Derrida all communication – however direct it may appear – entails hidden distance). As Charlotte remarks, commenting on the long drama precipitated by the false telegram that Dare sends in Somerset’s name, ‘It was the telegram that began it’ (V, xii).
Of course, what begins the whole drama of the novel is Paula’s refusal to be baptized and thus ‘to fulfil the Word’ (I, ii) or will of both her heavenly and also her earthly father (it is his dying request). Paula’s telegraphy, however, is part of this beginning in that it too is a refusal, albeit highly coded, of the father. For, in making possible the immediate to-and-fro of a dialogue, telegraphy very obviously departs from the monologic insistence of the ‘Word’ of her fathers. It is no accident that the novel’s very first telegraphic exchange is between two women and wholly ‘unintelligible’ to Somerset (I, v). Indeed, telegraphy is so dialogic and so dominated by women as to help the novel, as a whole, give a new and cryptic meaning to ‘mum’s the word’ (V, xi) – it’s no longer dad, as it were. After all, A Laodicean is not only about a woman but also, for the most part, actually written by a woman, Emma Hardy. Indeed, Seymour-Smith goes so far as to suggest that Emma had some part in the novel’s composition.31
Whether or not telegraphy takes writing out of the realm of the father it certainly gestures, once more like Derrida, towards a ‘writing [that]… is unattached to any house’.32 In this respect it again represents a more radical, even deconstructive model of writing than photography with its dependency on the room that was the camera. It is telegraphy alone which finally contests that domestication of the space of literature which Henry James articulated (also in 1881) in his famous phrase ‘the house of fiction’.33 This domestication is conspicuous throughout much of A Laodicean; it is no accident that Paula visits the house of Goethe (V, i) nor that attention is drawn to the vocabulary common to both architecture and writing: ‘the capitals in that letter were of the… semi-gothic type’ (III, ii). Indeed, the gravestone epitaphs (II, v) and the ‘names… cut’ into the castle tower (I, ix) return writing to that moment in its own pre-history in which, as an act of cutting or engraving, it was a working with stone.34 Both this moment, and the larger writing-building analogy of which it is a part, find a cryptic summary when Dare (referring to the moment he no longer had time for reading) declares that ‘literature went to the wall’ (II, v: my italics). By contrast Paula’s telegrams, communicated along a wire that passes out of a loophole, suggest a writing that goes through the wall. They violate our sense of the homogenized space (and indeed time) of the house:
the… message sped through the loophole of Stancy Castle, over the trees, along the railway, under bridges, across three counties – from extreme antiquity… to sheer modernism – and finally landed… in Somerset’s chambers (ΙII, V).
Though the telegram finally arrives the sheer distance of its journey highlights the possibility that it might not; a possibility that is realized every time Somerset’s telegrams to Paula are intercepted by her scheming uncle Abner (IV, v). Thus, even more than the novel’s photographs, the telegrams draw attention to an indirection and frailty that seems to be a general characteristic of communications in A Laodicean. Here letters too are intercepted (I, xii; IV, ii; IV, v), a newspaper is read two days late (III, xi), one invitation is never sent (I, xiii) and another is sent to an old address (III, vi), a letter is published anonymously (II, i), and a newspaper announces an engagement that has not taken place (III, xi). In short, the novel’s telegrams only make obvious what Derrida would argue is the non-homogenous space of all communication.35 To see it as also a non-domestic space means, in A Laodicean, that communication is always implicated in the world ‘out there’, the world of forces and powers.
This non-domestic space of communication is never more vividly pictured than when Havill, having reluctantly written a self-damaging letter of conscience, stands in a ‘deserted street’ in the middle of the night hesitating for some time in front of a letter-box before eventually, upon hearing ‘the footsteps of a solitary policeman’, he ‘let[s] the letter go’ (III, iv). Far, as it were, from the freedom of home this letter occupies a literally policed space, a space controlled by the implied threat of force. However, any simple, oppositional model of ‘peace within and violence without’ is continually blurred by Paula’s telegrams which pass through ‘an arrow-slit’ (I, ii) even as they go from inside to outside. In so doing, they suggest a more general complicity between the space (or rather spaces) of communication and the brutal fact of force. Indeed, philosophically speaking, force is inevitable even when thinking of literature as a house, as something homely and familiar; as both Heidegger and Derrida have stressed, the notion of ‘the house [merely] represses the violation that made it possible’ – namely, the exclusion of everything that is unfamiliar or unhomely.36 There is, it seems, no space in which writing may be sheltered from the world of force.
This fate, in fact, is encoded in the very history of the word ‘magazine’ – a history to which A Laodicean bears tacit witness. Not only is it first published in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine but, within the novel, we are reminded that the word has previously meant both a miscellaneous storehouse (Mr Ray, the shopkeeper, runs ‘a magazine of old clothes’ [V, xiii]) and, indeed, an ammunition store (‘two [sentinels stand] at the magazine’ [III, i]). The house of writing that is today’s ‘magazine’ leads directly, or at least etymologically, to the house of violence.
And this is nowhere more the case than in the writing that is A Laodicean. For even as it seems to narrow to the confines of domestic romance, a romance centred upon a heroine called ‘Power’, so we are continually referred to the historical workings of force – if only because, as Paul de Man remarks, ‘there is history from the moment that [the] word… “power”… emerge [s]’.37 Indeed, the romantic plot surrounding William Dare’s attempt to set up William De Stancy’s marriage to Paula Power works, in effect, as an encoding of Nietzsche’s famous contemporary slogan ‘Will to Power’.38 Written into the novel’s domestic interior is the very dynamic of the battleground that is, for Nietzsche, history.
The novel’s literal, domestic interior, the castle, is constant witness to such history; as well as being directly involved in the English Civil War (I, v), its crypts contain reminders of both the Wars of the Roses and the Crusades (I, xiv). Moreover, since it was built by the Normans the castle owes its very existence to the violent enforcement of conquest. In a passage on Lyon the narrator refers to ‘some of the ghasdiest atrocities… that the civilised world has beheld’ (IV, iii); this splendid castle suggests that the civilized world might just be founded upon such atrocities. This irony is clearly signalled in that wry remark about its walls being ‘of a thickness sufficient for the perpetuation of grand ideas’ (I, ii). The novel comes close to Walter Benjamin’s Marxist claim that ‘there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism’.39
The classic proof of this claim is, of course, European colonialism, traces of which just occasionally pass across the pages of A Laodicean. Composed at the beginning of the 1880s, arguably the decade of empire, the novel traces its enforcement in the person of Captain De Stancy (just back from serving ‘in the line’ in India [II, iv]), its commercial exploitation in Abner’s ‘Anglo-South-American’ trading station (V, xi), and its ‘civilising’ spoils in passing references to ‘Greek… statues… in the British museum’ (I, x),40 Paula’s ‘morocco case’ (III, v), Dare’s cigarettes (II, ii), and even ‘cotton thread’ (I, iv). The novel, it seems, is marked by the faintest intuition of what it is to occupy colonized space. It is an intuition most clearly articulated when De Stancy’s discovery that Dare was in town is compared to Robinson Crusoe’s discovery of ‘the print of a man’s foot in the sand’ (II, iv) – the foot, of course, of a black native. This, though, is a rare moment in a novel whose focus is, quite literally, white; witness Paula’s white baptismal robe (I, ii) and, later, her ‘dress of ivory white’ (I, xv), the young Sir William De Stancy’s ‘white hat… trousers… handkerchief… and… [even] face’ (I, v), Somerset’s ‘white signal’ of distress (I, ix), the two white parasols (I, viii; VI, ii), the ‘white… fragment of swan’s-down’ (I, xiii), the ‘white feather’ of cowardice (VI, ii), and the ‘watery white’ of the final moon (VI, v). In fact, for one cryptic moment, even that which is non-European is coloured white: after refusing baptism, Paula moves off in her carriage leaving behind only a passing cat – Somerset, we read, ‘saw a white Persian standing forlorn where the carriage had been’ (I, ii).
white